News Clips— Riot canceled; film at 11

"Failure of bridge to collapse Looms," is a memorable Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline, though it never ran in the P-I. It appeared years back on a newsroom bulletin board, the winning entry in a staff contest to parody stories about something that didn't happen (the real-life inspiration for the contest was the page 1 headline "Dan Evans Doesn't Want to Be Vice President.")

Nope, no one getting murdered here.

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Similarly, over the weekend, the failure of Pioneer Square to riot loomed, except on television. "Will it happen again? Are the cops prepared? Will the mayor sleep through this one too?" were the cautionary inquiries of TV anchors and reporters, replete, of course, with suggestive replays of the Fat Tuesday violence in the Square.

Alas, Fat Tuesday II turned out to be Skinny Saturday, a spirited and unmarred St. Paddy's Day in the Square. There were a few arrests for rowdiness, but it seems everyone followed the command of wags who posted signs around the Square saying, "All riots scheduled by the TV media for St. Patrick's Day have been cancelled." Just how big a riot failure was it? Anyone tuned in to the police radio band around 1 a.m. would have heard a different kind of action—one cop trying to arrange a blind date for another. (The second cop, staked out on the sinking ship parking garage, told the first, at a coffee shop nearby, to have the woman "stick her head out the door so I can see her.") The cop ended up getting her name and number. The failure of their date to collapse looms.